Chris Binns, Emeritus Professor of Nanoscience at the University of Leicester, was in Ciudad Real last October to sign his “Beatriz Galindo distinguished researcher” contract and will join the ApNano group in February/2020. The research project that won him the senior Beatriz Galindo grant (one of only 100 nationwide) is based on the gas-phase synthesis of magnetic hydrosols for biomedical applications. We look forward to implementing it and, generally, to benefitting from Chris’s large experience in nanoparticle deposition and characterization. Bienvenido a La Mancha, Chris!

The journal Chemistry of Materials has just accepted for publication our study (in collaboration with long-term collaborators) on the magnetism of random binary compacts comprising two uniformly mixed populations of soft and hard nanoparticles (preprint here). It turns out that the answer we have found for the question above is «it depends where!», as we inform directly in the title of the paper: «Simultaneous individual and dipolar collective properties in binary assemblies of magnetic nanoparticles». We have shown how compact mixtures may be employed as a tool to test or, rather, to define the collective character of a given magnetic property as that resulting in the collapse of the individual features caused by strong enough interactions. Crucially, such collective character must, in general, be ascribed to specific properties and not to the system as a whole.